


Bad Penny

by Highsmith (quimtessence)



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Character Study, Crossword Puzzles, Gen, Yuletide 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 07:01:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17038994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quimtessence/pseuds/Highsmith
Summary: A copper's life, presumably.





	Bad Penny

**Author's Note:**

  * For [empyrean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/empyrean/gifts).



> Sort of taking place at the beginning of _Moon Over Soho_ and maybe just before _Foxglove Summer_ if you squint.

The sky was like a faded picture postcard, where you knew there were colours and sunlight hiding in there somewhere, if only you could get a glimpse past the grime.

Peter, as a life-long Londoner, knew the deal, in that it was only going to get murkier by lunchtime. Might as well get used to the grime; it added character, after all, and you could never have too much character.

Nightingale didn't seem distraught by the prospect of Peter driving the Jag to Brightlingsea to visit Lesley. Peter had expected more of a protest, but, well... gift-horse... mouth. Peter wasn't entirely stupid. Afterwards, after walking Toby and thinking on his life choices, he joined Nightingale for a cup of tea and a crossword (for Nightingale). Peter had never acquired the pleasure or interest to try his hand at a crossword, but Nightingale seemed to believe it wasn't worth starting or ending his day without one. Peter knew about habit and habits, and had indulged in some himself, but he routine seemed more wearing than comfortable, as far as Peter was concerned.

They had a case at that point. Or they would have a case, provided Peter could find enough to keep it theirs. Nightingale nodded in a way which could be perceived as either disinterestedly or intensely interested, but the crossword seemed far more thrilling than Peter would think it to be, strictly speaking.

*

Peter wondered sometimes about how this was all going to pan out, as he often did when concentrating too hard on a forma, and this time around he wondered whether it would become any easier to master the magic. The learning curves, plural, were only going to get harder to climb successfully. It took longer than any task Peter had ever tried his hand at, and he had hardly touched the surface of the surface, if there even was such a thing. He wondered whether he would start becoming like Nightingale, age backwards or something, his body arranging itself around the magic. It was already arranging itself around it in a way which might mean irreversible brain damage in the not too distant future. His brain was on magic most of the time, even when he actively wasn't engaging with it, he thought. He had yet to find a way to stop thinking about it for most of his day, even if it was in a vague sort of way.

Maybe taking on crosswords was a good way of dealing.

*

Nightingale never seemed cross about little things. More like vaguely amused. Peter considered it a personality flaw he was willing to overlook for the sake of getting the Jag and not getting yelled at for no apparent reason. It was the epoch Nightingale had grown up in, Peter figured. Men had hobbies more out of survival than interest back then.

It wasn't that Peter needed a hobby, but maybe he did need something to distract him. Coppering and magicking couldn't be his entire life, shouldn't be _it_ morning to night to morning, rinse and repeat until your brain collapsed onto itself. He knew about having his days and years dominated by one thing, but family wasn't a hobby. Peter didn't know what it was because defining it, even to himself in the privacy of his own magic-fogged brain, was a slippery slope. Nightingale probably had hobbies beyond just crosswords. Molly certainty didn't, but she wasn't a cop. Toby just liked bacon.

*

"Good one?" he asked. Nightingale nodded absently, then looked up sharply if politely.

"Pardon?"

Peter nodded at the newspaper. "Your crossword." He fingered the rim of his cup. It was another day which started the same as other days. It was another morning.

"Decent." Back to it he went.

*

Dead bodies hardly held any appeal past the expiry date other than as either a victim to be avenged or a culprit one had apprehended through little effort of one's own.

Peter looked at the person who used to be a jazz player and thought, _He had a hobby and it didn't seem to matter_. Or it got him on the slab quicker. If Peter was going to get a hobby, he thought something with less potential towards an early death would be a pretty good choice. Magic didn't count. The hobby was meant to offset the early-graved-ness of the magic.

*

Nightingale was staring at him with barely kept in check impatience.

"You're not trying."

He was. Honest.

"You've mastered a werelight through practice and giving it your all, and especially through patience with yourself and your abilities. Everything will come in its time, provided you concentrate and work hard. You wouldn't be here if there weren't any potential in you."

He _was_ trying.

"You're not concentrating on the matter at hand. This should be your only focus, not an afterthought. This is the only way to move past." Past what?

Peter knew this to be true. He sighed and pressed his first two fingers to the bridge of his nose. He was hanging around Nightingale far too much, but found the gesture soothing nonetheless.

"Focus and concentration is the only way." Like beating a dead horse, proverbially speaking.

Peter thought briefly of stopping right then and there, of leaving, something, before he mentally slapped himself.

"I'm trying." And he did.

*

A few days afterwards, Peter asked for the crossword before Nightingale could get started on it.

"Is there a trick to it?" he asked. Nightingale's eyebrow didn't quite lower itself to its regular position for the next five minutes.

"No trick that I know of. A trick would also sort of defeat the purpose."

Nightingale offered him a pencil.

*

Peter never considered promotion. Since becoming part of the Folly even the mere random thought seemed preposterous. He did wonder at times what the next step would be after he'd finished his apprenticeship. It was the practicalities of it which boggled the mind. There had to be something. Logically. A hierarchy with a certain amount of flexibility had to exist, otherwise everything about the system he had willingly chosen to become a part of stopped making sense. A certain rigidity had to exist, but an absolute one made zero sense. Why bother? Motivation didn't always come easily for young coppers past the hump of that treacherous learning curve. Peter knew he wasn't immune to that. Others before him had surely not been.

He concentrated on the forma before he gave himself a migraine.

*

"How are you liking it?" Nightingale asked over his Earl Grey a few days later. Molly was hovering around, waiting for the prime moment to pile more fried eggs and sausages onto everyone's plates. She'd gone back to traditional breakfast food for that one morning, probably out of boredom. Even Peter found it exhilarating to see so much future heart disease on one plate.

"Pardon?"

"The crosswords," Nightingale explained.

Peter stared vaguely at the same definition he had been staring at for the past six minutes. Definitely no trick to this, other than the trick of making one feel completely worthless and like the biggest idiot to have even walked this Earth, and Peter's mum had been managing that quite easily for the past couple of decades.

There were many answers Peter could give that would make him sound as if he vaguely enjoyed his new hobby. Many answers also would make him sound less like an idiot to Nightingale, if only barely. He went with, "I'm working on it." Not his best reply.

*

The sky was like a telly with a bad signal during an early Doctor Who episode. Peter expected as much. He'd often had the feeling the London sky was always tuned to the worst signal money could buy. He almost found it charming.

He didn't know if the Faceless Man had ever had a hobby, but Peter would bet it wasn't doing the morning and evening crosswords.

Life after the Folly wasn't ever going to happen, Peter now realised. A faint hope Nightingale would always be there, a superior officer with more answers than there were questions, burned in him. Because someone had to make the world make sense. After Lesley. After the Faceless Man. Someone had to look at four across and scribble an answer in pencil.


End file.
